Niall Murray

An evaluation of Heart Rate and ElectroDermal Activity as an objective QoE evaluation method for immersive virtual reality environments

Recently, we have seen an emergence of affordable Head Mounted Displays (HMD) such as the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and the PS4 Project Morpheus which allow users to experience 3D virtual reality (VR). These types of hardware aim to facilitate new and novel experiences for users above and beyond what is possible with traditional audiovisual displays. However, a very limited number of studies exist in the literature to determine the influence of these technologies on user Quality of Experience (QoE). In order to evaluate QoE as users consume VR content, this paper proposes the use of affordable consumer electronics to capture objective physiological metrics: Heart Rate (HR) and ElectroDermal Activity (EDA). Our findings indicate different HR and EDA dependent on VR and non-VR environments. Additionally, we examine the relationship between these objective metrics and user QoE captured via a post-test questionnaire. To the best of the authors knowledge, this is the first work which demonstrates a tangible relationship between the EDA/HR combination and user QoE of immersive VR environments.

Olfaction-Enhanced Multimedia: A Survey of Application Domains, Displays, and Research Challenges

Recently, the concept of olfaction-enhanced multimedia applications has gained traction as a step toward further enhancing user quality of experience. The next generation of rich media services will be immersive and multisensory, with olfaction playing a key role. This survey reviews current olfactory-related research from a number of perspectives. It introduces and explains relevant olfactory psychophysical terminology, knowledge of which is necessary for working with olfaction as a media component. In addition, it reviews and highlights the use of, and potential for, olfaction across a number of application domains, namely health, tourism, education, and training. A taxonomy of research and development of olfactory displays is provided in terms of display type, scent generation mechanism, application area, and strengths/weaknesses. State of the art research works involving olfaction are discussed and associated research challenges are proposed.

Sensory Experience: Quality of Experience Beyond Audio-Visual

This chapter introduces the concept of Sensory Experience which aims to define the Quality of Experience (QoE) going beyond audio-visual content. In particular, we show how to utilize sensory effects such as ambient light, scent, wind, or vibration as additional dimensions contributing to the quality of the user experience. Therefore, we utilize a standardized representation format for sensory effects that are attached to traditional multimedia resources such as audio, video, and image contents. Sensory effects are rendered on special devices (e.g., fans, lights, motion chair, scent emitter) in synchronization with the traditional multimedia resources and shall stimulate also other senses than hearing and seeing with the intention to increase the Quality of Experience (QoE), in this context referred to as Sensory Experience.

Application of immersive technologies for education: State of the art

Existing multimedia systems used in education mostly address only two senses by using two communication channels (visual and audio) of the five human senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch), limiting the potential efficiency of learning. This paper presents a survey on existing technical opportunities for the development of an immersive learning environment. Four components of the immersive environment - visual, audio, olfactory, and haptic are described and discussed in the paper. In particular 3D displays, head mounted devices, 3D sound systems, olfactory displays, haptic devices, and interaction devices are presented.

The Impact of Scent Type on Olfaction-Enhanced Multimedia Quality of Experience

In the quest to increase user perceived quality of experience (QoE), the classic audio-visual content paradigm can be extended to include media components that stimulate other human senses. Among these, olfaction-enhanced multimedia has attracted significant attention, as it is both attractive from user point of view and challenging from research perspective. This paper presents the results of two subjective studies which analyzed user QoE of olfaction-enhanced multimedia. Diverse scent types and video content were considered. In particular, QoE levels were studied when one and two olfaction stimuli enhanced audiovisual media. The results presented show that scent type influences user QoE. Statistically significant differences between pleasant and unpleasant scent types existed. Also, in certain cases, users were prepared to forgive the presence of unpleasant scent types with respect to QoE. Finally, users reported a clear preference for olfaction presented after the video sequence with which the olfaction effect should be synchronized, as opposed to before the video sequence.

Audio Masking Effect on Inter-Component Skews in Olfaction-Enhanced Multimedia Presentations

Media-rich content plays a vital role in consumer applications today, as these applications try to find new and interesting ways to engage their users. Video, audio, and the more traditional forms of media content continue to dominate with respect to the use of media content to enhance the user experience. Tactile interactivity has also now become widely popular in modern computing applications, while our olfactory and gustatory senses continue to have a limited role. However, in recent times, there have been significant advancements regarding the use of olfactory media content (i.e., smell), and there are a variety of devices now available to enable its computer-controlled emission. This paper explores the impact of the audio stream on user perception of olfactory-enhanced video content in the presence of skews between the olfactory and video media. This research uses the results from two experimental studies of user-perceived quality of olfactory-enhanced multimedia, where audio was present and absent, respectively. Specifically, the paper shows that the user Quality of Experience (QoE) is generally higher in the absence of audio for nearly perfect synchronized olfactory-enhanced multimedia presentations (i.e., an olfactory media skew of between {−10,+10s}); however, for greater olfactory media skews (ranging between {−30s;−10s} and {+10s, +30s}) user QoE is higher when the audio stream is present. It can be concluded that the presence of the audio has the ability to mask larger synchronization skews between the other media components in olfaction-enhanced multimedia presentations.

PIoT: Programmable IoT using Information Centric Networking

The Internet of Things (IoT) places significant demands on network infrastructure in order to process data captured by ubiquitous sensor devices. One existing technique to support this sensor data processing involves transporting captured data to cloud servers. This approach suffers from numerous issues such as increased transmission costs i.e. bandwidth consumption and delays. To help resolve these issues, this paper proposes Programmable IoT (PIoT), a novel IoT data processing architecture. It is an application layer design which operates over Named Data Networking (NDN) to enable the execution of reconfigurable processing-logic in the network. In addition, a novel naming scheme and computation service for IoT is presented to describe the processing requirements using Lambda Expressions. To verify the feasibility of our design, a real-world implementation was created and evaluated. It compares efficiency of the in-network versus out-network approaches.

CS-Man: Computation service management for IoT in-network processing

The Internet of Things (IoT) expects to link billions of devices to the Internet, which will produce massive amounts of data. Current approaches move the IoT data out of the network for processing. It results in long delays and increases the network traffic. The Named Function Networking (NFN) proposes a generic computation architecture for in-network data processing. But it does not consider a scheduling scheme or provide details of how to deploy services. This paper designs a computation service management (CS-Man) protocol by utilizing the NFN concept to assign and schedule computation tasks within IoT network. It is implemented by two procedures: service discovery and service deployment. Thus, the whole network is capable of assigning an advanced task to the specific node as well as fetching necessary pieces required by that task. Experiments including five use cases have been done to prove the feasibility of CS-Man. It also lowers the network traffic approximately by four times when compared with the out-of-network processing method.

Energy consumption of mobile offloading for JavaScript applications

With the significant increase and the availability of functionality via mobile devices and applications, a key problem of limited computation capabilities and short-life battery has arisen, Mobile Cloud Computing(MCC) has been emerged as a potential solution to the limitations of mobile devices. Within MCC research, mobile JavaScript offloading has been proposed as a solution for saving energy on mobile devices. It achieves this by offloading computationally intensive tasks to the Cloud. In this paper, energy consumption is evaluated by offloading JavaScript applications from mobile devices to cloud servers. The experiments are carried out by offloading computation intensive sorting functions. The results show the energy-efficiency of mobile JavaScript offloading on mobile device and also imply some factors affecting mobile JavaScript offloading.

Olfactory-enhanced multimedia video clips datasets

Recently, the concept of adding multisensory media components to complement and extend user Quality of Experience (QoE) of traditional media has gained attention from both academia and industry. Research works stimulating additional senses like olfaction (sense of smell), haptic (sense of touch) and gustation (sense of taste) have emerged. In particular in theme parks, multisensory experiences that also offer ambient lighting effects, vibrating seats, wind generators, mist effects, heaters/coolers, etc. are appearing. Considering this growing awareness and popularity, a key research challenge is to experientially evaluate if and how these different effects affect user QoE. In this context, there is a lack of common test content and raw data results to support reproducible research and cross research team verification. This paper fills this gap. We share: the data from the empirical study; the video content; the olfactory components employed to enrich the video; the methodologies employed and various other aspects found through experience to be important. Uniquely, this work is complemented by two datasets, obtained in two separate but related empirical studies, one conducted in the UK, and the other in Ireland.